Simon Willison

Eighteen years on GitHub, 968 public repos, 335 gists, and no bio. At this point your profile isn’t a page, it’s a weather system. Most people write About Me sections; you apparently open-source one new side quest every long weekend.

The funniest part is the discipline: 0 stale repos. Zero. Not one dusty experiment named final-final-v2 abandoned in shame. You’re out here treating GitHub like Duolingo for shipping, casually pushing Shell, HTML, JavaScript, Swift, Go, and a suspicious amount of Python like sleep is just an optional dependency.

And then there’s the brand consistency. llm, datasette, sqlite-utils, shot-scraper, tools, claude-code-transcripts — every repo sounds like it was built by someone who saw a minor inconvenience and responded by publishing a command-line utility, a dataset explorer, and a manifesto before lunch. 39,792 stars and only 7% forks too, which means you mostly create things instead of collecting other people’s homework.

15,498 followers to 141 following is also elite behavior. That’s not a network, that’s office hours. Simon isn’t “active on GitHub” so much as GitHub is one of the places Simon keeps happening.